Jean-Marc Coly

Jean-Marc Coly, Managing Director of Amundi Immobilier

We focus on quality locations and pooling of risks

Jean-Marc Coly is Managing Director of Amundi Immobilier which manages €24 billion in real estate assets, including a selectively rising share of retail premises.

What is your view of retail real estate?

The Eldorado of the 1990s and 2000s is over. What we are seeing now are city centres that are emptying and shopping centres that are struggling. Retail parks are holding up, provided that they are very new. Eastern Europe was a wonderful market for growth but those days are also behind us. The model is clearly changing and we will no doubt start seeing a greater divide between the winners and the losers but, for the time being, we have little visibility. We are hearing contradictory theories, and experts themselves are saying they are unsure. In these conditions, we are obviously remaining cautious, focusing on safe bets, though they may be more expensive and have a lower yield.

What is your investment strategy in terms of retail sites?

For us, retail is an area for opportunistic diversification. It will not account for more than 15% to 20% of our annual investments, the majority of which are in office space. The year 2017 will be somewhat exceptional: of the €4 billion already invested this year,  €500 million were placed in retail properties, notably two portfolios of diversified assets that we acquired from Grosvenor Europe, as well as three stores located on Avenue Victor Hugo in Paris. This shows that the size or the nature of the assets are not a criterion. We focus on the location and on pooling the risks thanks to portfolios that are spread out over a large number of sites. On the other hand, we have become quite wary of shopping centres with hypermarket anchor stores, which do not always make the income we expect for our funds.

Do you have a particular value creation strategy?

We have a team devoted to retail real estate, which analyses the projects presented to us and carefully selects core assets with a confirmed yield. We are not at all involved in creating value or restructuring assets – that’s not what we do. Our business as asset managers, in line with our location strategy focussed on sites that are easy to lease, consists above all in keeping our tenants satisfied and maintaining the flow of rental income.